Working FAST (somewhat related to NaSoAlMo)

This is pretty much the only way I've ever recorded in non-bedroom environments, too -- usually by borrowing my way into other people's space and equipment and then trying to knock something together in a weekend. I guess it's harder, in those cases, to build something into a song gradually (unless you're doing edits, or lots of re-recording), so there's less ability to be adding new ideas every time one strikes you -- but there's something so fun about being the only one in a big room with a bunch of equipment around you, especially if you're making time to crawl around plugging things in odd directions and making sounds you've never made before.

Really? I think that's what's most fun about doing this: you finish one part, and then you automatically move on to the next part, thinking "What do I want to add now? Marimba? Maracas? Fuzz bass?" For me, it's all about those spur-of-the-moment decisions.

Once, when I was visiting my parents for a month for xmas break from college, I pledged to write and record (acoustic guitar & handheld tape recorder) a song a day for every day I was there. 95% of the songs were crap, but it was good discipline.

N/A: Yeah, I love that moving-on bit, how easily you can just add a layer to something, though I guess I get that from doing live recording on the computer, too. But what I mean is, well, say I'm messing around in the in-a-room sense and I find a good bass sound, and I want to record it -- maybe I'll make some kind of framework out of that and then lay it down. But then, three hours later, when I'm doing the marimbas -- if I suddenly get an idea that there should be a big key change somewhere, it's way harder to go back and alter that original framework to accommodate it. But I guess you guys have software in the studio, so you can edit fairly easily.

The main reason I think about this is that I'm a very lazy songwriter: if I find some sound I like, I'll just repeat it a lot. And if I'm excited about adding the fuzz bass next, I won't stop to write a bunch of fills or nuances into whatever gets recorded before that. So I like that computers give me the option to sketch those simple, repetitive outlines first, and then go back later to add complexity and changes and such.

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My band did our newest album like this (arranging a bunch of tunes and recording them within the span of a few days), but that's a different thing. Not as low pressure or experimental.

I make editing/tracking rules too. As in, I'm only gonna record this guitar part a maximum of two times all the way through and then move on. If I can't pull it off in two takes (or one comped from those two), then I need to rearrange it to something I can play easily in the interest of speed. If other parts of the song need to change to fit with the new guitar part, they will.

And yes, I will cheat and play the guitar part three times if I just know I'm gonna nail it the third time, but again the guidelines are to keep me focused and keep me out of take-an-hour-to-try-every-effect-setting-on-this-one-2-second-riff.

I'm gonna be in this boat soon. I've written 12 songs for NaSoAlMo (though I need to clean up a couple of them and finish writing a few verses here and there), and I'm going home to my studio on the 25th. I'll have from the middle of the 25th through the end of the month to record everything I've written over the course of the past few weeks. I know I'm gonna err on the side of sparse arrangements for the sake of time, but I think it will be fun to focus on things like getting a good guitar sound for a simple me-and-guitar song instead of like spending a whole day arranging and programming a string section.